Page 250 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

And to have heat in a bathroom! That was the height of decadence.
My sister and I had to share a single tiny closet. If you had three pairs
of anything, that was a luxury. He believed in living simply and
thinking highly.
He personally dug by hand the enormous cellar. It filled up, as did
the yard, with all sorts of junk—broken tools, old tires. It was the
bane of my mother’s existence. She had a sense of order, and he was
a rather scattered person—didn’t care where he left anything. In the
garage at home, he was always patching a tire, sharpening knives, and
down in the basement he would play with pieces of wood, carving.
He had some pretty decent tools, some of which I think he made
himself.
He also made wine down there. He would bring home flats of
grapes that were about to turn and put them in a barrel with sugar. It
drew a tremendous number of flies, which got my mother excited.
He had a great distrust of his neighbors, blue-collar God-fearing
Iowa types, so he would have me stand outside waving a piece of
smoldering automobile tire up and down whenever he had to do
something with the wine. That nauseating burning rubber would
completely mask the very strong smell of fermenting grapes.
When Papa came home from fourteen hours of work, he would
like to take a drink of brandy—which he distilled himself, as well. He
knew how to work copper, and built a Rube Goldberg sort of still
which he placed in the bathtub. It was a square copper drum on a
little pedestal, with a coiled tube that dripped into something; from
there the liquid went somewhere else, and finally through a pipette
into a bottle. And what came out was pure strong brandy. During the
days when he was making it, we couldn’t take a bath, and strangers
were not allowed into the house. And he would sometimes make
mead, simmering it on my mother’s stove in a huge pot. It would
have to cook for twenty-four to thirty-six hours, making a very heavy,
depressing smell. And, of course, we couldn’t let anybody into the
house at that time, either. But he had great contempt for anyone who
made or drank beer!
In the war years, with all the labor shortages, Papa was able to
make a few dollars. He hated income tax. So instead of depositing
some of his earnings in a bank, he put bills into Mason jars and
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